I didn't exactly expect that to be a controversial
node. The problem is, I keep running into people who
just don't think about logging program status, or
error conditions, or emitting any sort of status info
at all... those are the people I wrote the node
for.

On the subject of notification: cron(8) will
mail any output to you (well, to $MAILTO) after
each cron job. I imagine other similar facilities exist
elsewhere. Provided you don't get mail from your crons
on a regular basis ("Hey! I completed successfully!
Isn't that great?"), mail from cron(8) is an
effective error-reporting facility; you don't have to wait
until an error-checking/log polishing script runs at some
time in the future, you know right away when the job
finishes. (Or at least the next time you check your mail.)

--

FoxtrotUniform

Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other